The Most Depressing Campaign Ever

Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- I cannot remember a presidential
campaign quite so dreary as the one through which we are
currently suffering.

Carl Sandburg is supposed to have remarked that every
candidate should carry an extra hat -- to pull rabbits out of
once elected. This year nobody is promising us rabbits. Nobody
is promising much of anything, other than to avoid the
overweening awfulness of the other guy. Only 14 percent of
Americans expect their children’s lives to be better than their
own, according to Rasmussen Reports, the lowest figure ever
recorded. We are truly in the midst of a great depression --
psychological, not economic -- and our politics are only
dragging us down.

Some 80 years ago, in his masterwork “Ideology and Utopia,”
the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that democratic
politics are always utopian. It is only natural, he wrote, that
those who seek office will promise not only improvement but also
near-perfection. Implicit in his thinking is the idea that
voters choose among parties based less on concrete or
incremental progress than on the utopian vision that they
prefer. Politics, in short, appeal to our dreams.

If this was ever true, it isn’t any longer. The Republicans
promise to make the economy grow faster. The Democrats promise
that we will all have adequate health care. The Republicans
promise to rebuild the Navy -- although still to less than half
its size during the Civil War. The Democrats promise never to
touch Social Security or Medicare -- although how they will pay
for either remains a mystery. Even if kept, these promises are
tiny; specific, to be sure, possibly even attainable -- who
knows? -- but encouraging a smallness of vision.

Not Great

Nobody seems to think we should be dreaming of greatness.
On the left, the message is that we must, in our private lives,
exercise less of the freedom granted by our preponderance, lest
we further befoul the environment and perhaps our own bodies.
The right, meanwhile, says that government, too, must do less --
lest we befoul the economy, and perhaps our own souls.

Yes, there are bits of magic on order. One party taps its
wand and declares that across-the-board tax cuts will save us;
the other waves its hand and assures us that a little more
stimulus is all we need. Apart from the competing tribes of true
believers, nobody really has much faith any longer in such
parlor tricks. In any case, their very smallness testifies to
the poverty of our political imagination.

The subtext of the current campaign is that we have reached
our limits, that we cannot do all that we used to do -- in
short, that the American century is creaking toward its end.

Agree or disagree, this implication is difficult to miss.
And it’s depressing; deeply, profoundly depressing.
Psychiatrists tell us that many people who have lost a great
deal in the financial crisis are suffering from symptoms not
unlike post-traumatic stress disorder. Is it possible that the
entire country has the same condition?

True, a formal diagnosis of PTSD requires exposure to an
event entailing serious risk of harm or death. But consider the
rest of the symptoms: the flashbacks to the moment when it all
went wrong, the certainty that the future is now constrained,
the constant irritability and hypervigilance against imagined
threats, the inability to function normally. This list may
describe the U.S. today more accurately than we would like to
believe.

Our politics in particular involve every symptom: We
repeatedly return to the ground of disaster (seeking to place
blame), we bicker over a future that seems small and limited,
and in every gaffe we find evidence of the other side’s
nefariousness.

Not Large

I do not mean in any of this to make light of the situation
of those suffering from genuine PTSD, some of them friends of
mine. I am drawing an analogy, not an identity. But I think the
analogy is apt. Our national confidence has been shaken, by the
economic mess at home and by the mixed results of our military
adventurism abroad. As a result, we quarrel constantly over the
small, unable to focus on the large.

True, the candidates now and then try to paint great
visions, but these efforts are swiftly buried in an avalanche of
negative advertising -- from both sides -- along with its close
cousin, the constant attacks from partisans on cable television
and talk radio. The predominance of attack as our mode of
political discourse is an important sign of where we are. Attack
ads encourage us to pay attention to the past instead of the
future, to select our candidate by accepting a narrative about
mendacity or even wickedness rather than by comparing visions of
the future.

Scholars disagree whether negative advertising lowers or
raises voter turnout, and some work suggests it has little
effect either way. (One recent paper even proposes the
counterintuitive conclusion that negative advertising is most
likely to depress turnout among those who have already made up
their minds.) Whatever the effect on turnout, negative
advertising can hardly lift the national mood, and more likely
contributes to the rising sense of hopelessness, the shared
intuition that we are no longer equal to the problems that beset
us.

Therapists who treat PTSD patients often encourage a
revisiting of the trauma itself. They intend by this a carefully
guided experience in order to make the pain bearable, not a
pointless wallowing that characterizes the current campaign.

A century ago, in his study of democracy, the British
jurist James Bryce set out to explain why American politics were
so much richer and more serious than politics in Europe. He
attributed much of the difference to a pervasive optimism in
American affairs, an optimism that he found in the private as
well as the public lives of the citizenry. Indeed, although
Americans engaged in politics as necessary, it was never “the
first thing in the citizen’s thoughts.” The national attention,
Bryce found, was constantly on the greater future toward which
the nation was pointed.

Today, only 14 percent of us still believe in that future,
and those seeking our votes seem too busy tossing mud at each
other to care. What we need at this moment is a candidate
willing to call off the dogs and call us once more to greatness,
by doing the serious if difficult work of laying out a path
toward the brighter day for which an unhappy nation yearns.

(Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The
Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama,” and his
most recent novel is “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.”)

Today’s highlights: the editors on why to resist Syria
intervention calls and on parents who refuse to have their kids
vaccinated; Jonathan Alter on why past elections don’t predict
future ones; Noah Feldman on Olympians playing to lose; William
Pesek on rising tensions in the South China Sea; Jonathan Weil
on Standard Chartered and money laundering; Steven Greenhut on
the use of municipal bankruptcies to stiff investors; Caleb
Scharf on future telescopes that could better explore black
holes.